Abby Monday
It’s Abby Monday. She’s about to lose a top tooth and starting to look a little snaggley, kinda like Jewel.
Gymkata!
Gymnastics is the new activity at our house. And Gymkata is the best martial arts movie ever made.
(Two SB600s for the rim lights. One AB800 in an umbrella for the front fill. SB26 for the splash of blue on the poorly done background.)
Bloop
Back when I got into the digital photography I did some drop photos using milk. I always meant to try it again, so now that I have a real macro lens I looked up how to do it on the Internets and I did it. It’s a tedious project. It’s out of my system now and I can move on.
Abby Thursday
I finally got around to getting some pictures of Abby in her dancing togs.
Strobist: SB600 on floor fired through shoot-thru umbrella. SB600 in shoot-thru pointed down from above.
(Note: I know the vignette is too strong making the edges of the photo blend into the blog background, but I don’t feel like fixing it.)
Yee-Haw!
Abby has come a long way since she first rode the springy horse two years ago. In the beginning, we had to put her up on the thing and tell her to hold on. The other day she just grabbed her cowboy hat, jumped up on there and started yelling “yee-haw!” Strobist info for the top pic: SB-600 in silver reflective umbrella at 1/2 power camera left and SB-26 fired into the ceiling for fill at probably 1/2 power. The bottom photo was lit with an SB-400 on the camera probably fired into the ceiling on auto an sunlight through a window on camera right.
For you photographers, the Today Show profiled the little town where my parents live. It’s home to the last lab processing the iconic Kodachrome slide film.
Things Are Starting To Gel
When I was a young’n, just about every weekend I would go with my Dad to my Grandma’s place in DeQueen, where I would be made to do all sorts of slave labor. One of the main things I would slave away at was mowing the vast lawns on her 3 acres during the summer. I actually kind of enjoyed the mowing. Grandma had a lawn tractor, so it wasn’t particularly strenuous, and I’d do a lot of good thinking while mowing. It sure beat the hell out of cutting firewood, the other main chore I was forced to participate in. You can’t think well and load firewood at the same time.
The best part of mowing, however, took place for only a few weeks during June when the wild plums were ripe. Grandma had a couple of wild-plum thickets on her place and few free-standing plum bushes. Every time I’d pass a thicket or a bush, I’d get a big handful of plums and eat them while I mowed. Grandma would also make jelly out of those plums. The best jelly I’ve ever had.
What A Good Lookin’ Kid
Gina wanted to get some pictures of Abby in honor of her reaching the milestone of becoming 3 years old, so we headed out to the little historic homesteader cabin at Burns Park with my picher takin stuff. This is some of what we came back with.
Teach A 3-year-old To Fish And She’ll Probably Starve
Abby’s Gramps gave her a fishing rod on Easter and she had a big time fishing in the bathtub. When we got home she wanted a fishing rod at her house so she could fish in her own bathtub. So the next week we got her a Barbie fishing rod and tiny tackle box at Wal-Mart. I was looking beyond the bathtub, so I also got some hooks, bobbers and split-shot sinkers.
In order to go fishing for real, you’ve got to get a tin can and go dig up some worms in the back yard. She found digging worms enjoyable and we found quite a few, though they were small.
Flash Play
After my run Wednesday at Two Rivers Park I headed over to Pinnacle Mountain to see if there was anything worth shooting. I stopped at the arboretum off Pinnacle Mountain Road thinking I might get a shot of some cypress knees down by the Little Maumelle River. I did something to my knee during my run and I was limping pretty heavily. (I later made the self diagnosis of ilotibial band syndrome.) I barely made it to the river and to add insult to injury I couldn’t find anything swampy that I wanted to shoot.
On my limp back up he trail I came across this dead armadillo and decided to try my hand at a little Strobist style off-camera flash. I underexposed the ambient light and let the flash provide the correct exposure on the carcass. It didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned. I envisioned a well-lit corpse with a goodly expanse of dark forest in the background. But hand-holding the flash while trying to get low on a badly hurting knee while enduring the stink of a dead armadillo is harder than it sounds. I gave up after two frames and this is what I got.
A Warm Day
Hallelujah, we got a warm day. Abby and I headed to Pinnacle Mountain to fly a kite. Unfortunately, the wind wasn’t blowing much at all. Note the kite laying on the ground. So we spent three hours on the playground see-sawing, sliding and swinging. I was playing around with balancing flash and ambient light. Abby was between the camera and the sun. I exposed for the sky and then fired the flash off camera at Abby’s shadow side.
Abby Picasso
Bitter-cold days are the bane of the stay-at-home-dad. It didn’t get above freezing today. It was one of those days where you don’t even want to get into a car to go somewhere else even if your destination is in a warm building. You have to get all those extra clothes on and there’s the hunching of the shoulders against the cold wind. Then the car is cold until you’re almost to where you’re going. And you’ll have a cold walk from the parking lot. And then on the way home the car will be cold again. All of that is at least doubled with a 2-year-old. Especially if she insists on sitting in the driver’s seat and jacking with the steering wheel and pushing the radio buttons for five minutes while you stand in cold.
The best bet is to stay inside. It turns out that little kids don’t really care about the cold, but they care about being bored. Even if they don’t understand that boredom is what they are feeling. Not even Abby can watch Dora the Explorer all day without getting tired of it. So I busted out the finger paints in the hopes that I could keep her entertained for about 15 minutes or so. I also thought I could get some good pictures of her covered in paint.
A Post Irony Christmas Card
Gina started breaking down the Christmas tree this evening and I protested, saying we hadn’t shot our annual family Christmas portrait. I use “annual” loosely here. So I got all my pitchure takin’ junk out. In hindsight, it would have been better to think of this earlier in the season. I would have shaved and worn a decent shirt and we would have combed Abby’s hair.
Merry Christmas
We had us a whole mess of Christmas this year. First, we moved to another city a couple of weeks before the big day. Then for the big day loaded up and went to Branson to see Mimi and PawPaw. That’s where I gave Abby the jack-in-the-box that has apparently been giving her nightmares ever since.
How To Get A Bargain On A Christmas Tree
We got a late start, what with the moving and all, but we finally put up our Christmas tree. I don’t know what the deal is, but Little Rock has a dearth of your tradition Christmas tree lots. And by dearth, I mean none. We finally ended up at Cantrell Gardens where word was the trees were grossly overpriced. But one of the advantages of waiting until three days before Christmas is that you can get a $60 tree for half price. And a $20 tree stand for half price, too. Sweet.
Our tree is only five feet tall, much shorter than what we usually get, but this year it seems like we have enough ornaments to properly cover the tree.
I set used the Strobist’s recommendation on how to light a living room for these types of family events but I think I put the flashes in the wrong places. (It worked a lot better for Thanksgiving dinner.) Plus I had the camera on the focus mode where it chooses what to focus on. I thought that would make it easier for Gina to get some shots of me and Abby. The camera invariably focused on the tree and not on the people. I need to get this right before Christmas Day.
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot …
Fayetteville gussies up its downtown square every year for Christmas. The city makes a big deal out of it. We’ve never been so we thought we ought to go before blowing this popsicle stand. I have to say I was underwhelmed. It was fairly pretty, but it was tough to find a good photo. Maybe if I had my tripod and I weren’t doing a family outing and the wind weren’t blowing about 50 mph, I’d have got some better photos.
Turkey Day
We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.
All Hallows Eve
What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.
Abby Wednesday
Abby was looking pretty cute right after her bath today, so I dragged out my Strobist gear to try some on-axis fill flash. I set up my 45 inch Westcott reflective silver umbrella with the SB-26 on 1/2 power and for the on-axis fill used my SB-400 covered with a plastic Country Time Lemonade container over it as a diffuser. (The lemonade now resides in a Zip-Loc bag in a kitchen cabinet.) The point is to throw some light to soften the shadows created by the main light. Now, David Hobby uses a ring light as his on-axis flash. I don’t have a ring light. I’m not even sure I know what a ring light is. I had to make do with my DIY rig.
The Farm
My parents live on 40 acres west of Parsons, Kan., that used to be part of a larger working farm. There are several sheds, silos and whatnot still on the property, including this old-time chicken coop. This is the kind of coop that Foghorn Leghorn guarded in the old cartoons. The outside has great peeling paint and deteriorating wood. The kind of stuff we amateur photographers like to take pichurs of. I set up a couple of flashes inside so the ceiling and back wall of the coop would be visible.
Abby Sunday
It’s Abby Sunday.
A few days ago Abby was sitting at the table after dinner and she put her chin on her hands in a very cute way. I knew it would make a good picture so I tried to recreate it this afternoon. I put a flash and umbrella on the table to camera right and another flash camera left and behind her with my DIY gridspot mounted to provide a hair light. She didn’t really want to go along with my directions and this was as close as I could get to her original pose.
Two Abby stories: First, the other day we were eating dinner and she started saying, “A-B-Y” over and over. We finally realized she was spelling her name. We told her it was A-B-B-Y and she started adding the extra B. She said she was practicing it at school.
Second, this one’s kinda gross. That’s why I like it. She’s been doing this thing while eating where she tilts her head all the way back and puts food in her mouth. It generally causes her to gag and we tell her to stop it. At lunch today she tilted her head back and popped a single macaroni and cheese noodle in. It immediately gagged her and I could tell she coughed it up the back way into her nose. Then she sneezed and the noodle shot out her nose followed by a wad of snot. It was funny.
More Hummin’
Our two hummers have been coming to the feeder each evening so I set out to shoot them again. I like the background better than my first try, but the angle wasn’t as good. Most of the shots got the back of the birds and, while interesting, you need to be able to see the eye and beak, I think. I’m thinking I’ll move the feeder to a new spot to try to get better angles. Strobist info: Vivitar 285HV at about 120 degrees on camera right at 1/4 power and SB26 about 45 degrees on camera right at 1/4 power.
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